Museums: a wholesome recreational alternative to procreation and the pub*

The Attic (a name which commemorates our first physical location) is, first and foremost, a site for the research students of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester: a virtual community which aims to include all students, be they campus-based and full-time, or distance-learning and overseas. But we welcome contributions from students of museum studies - and allied subject areas - from outside the School and from around the world. Here you will find a lot of serious stuff, like exhibition and research seminar reviews, conference alerts and calls for papers, but there's also some 'fluff'; the things that inspire, distract and keep us going. After all, while we may be dead serious academic types, we're human too.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Brown Bag 25th January 2012

Marilena Alivizatou, from UCL, on Intangible HeritageIn this enjoyable Brown Bag, Marilena gave a comprehensiveintroduction to the history – and the cultural politics - of intangibleheritage, before looking at how a number of museums around the world collect,display and interpret intangible heritage. She could easily have filled a two-hourslot with her fascinating international examples, but the snapshots shepresented offered a thought-provoking glimpse into different approaches topractice.She began with a potted history of the recognition of the importanceof intangible heritage by the international cultural community, emphasisingUNESCO’s key role in raising the profile of intangible heritage, through itsprogrammes of listing. Marilena worked at UNESCO for a year and her insider’sperspective was interesting. She argued that UNESCO’s work was informed by a ‘preservationethos’, which had its routes in colonialism, with a dominant nineteenth-centuryidea that ‘native’ culture was disappearing and needed to be preserved withurgency, before it was lost. She suggested that this starting point gave riseto a conceptual approach to heritage, which valued the supposedly authentic andunchanging and wanted to preserve it from contamination by outside influences: onepolitical impetus for the preservation of intangible heritage, for example,came from South American governments in the 1970s who were concerned about theappropriation - or exploitation - of traditional music by Western popularmusicians.The first unsuccessful attempt by UNESCO to establish an instrumentto protect intangible heritage came in 1989, but there was real progress in1993 when an intangible heritage section was established, and the terminology of ‘IntangibleHeritage’ was adopted, replacing the previous terminology of ‘folklore’, which hadperhaps given an impression of somewhat marginal cultural significance. A series of initiatives followed, leading tothe signing in 2003 of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of IntangibleHeritage. The Convention aims to give communities a prominent role inidentifying practices that should be preserved, although Marilena suggested thatin practice it tended to operate in more of a ‘top down’ manner, withgovernments promoting aspects of culture that they perceive as significant.Parties to the Convention are committed to safeguarding these practices and tocompiling inventories of them, and more than 200 cultural expressions arecurrently on the list.Marilena commented that the Convention had been shaped byUNESCO’s over-riding preservation ethos and speculated about the effect ofthis. Do people become prisoners of their heritage, frozen in a cultural formperceived as ideal in some way, but shut off from innovation? She gave anexample of a community in Peru who preserve a traditional way of life, with noelectronic communications, for instance, implicitly questioning who benefittedfrom this: the people themselves, or the tourists who visit them? Marilenasuggested that the Marxist notion of creative destruction might offer analternative approach to understanding intangible heritage, enabling us toconsider the heritage of change and impermanence. She argued that culturalpreservation by governments and elites can be artificial, restricting thefreedom of choice of individuals and communities. She illustrated this withreference to the wearing of the traditional Goh costume in Bhutan: some peopleprefer to wear warmer, synthetic alternatives in cold weather, but wear the Gohon top to maintain the tradition.Marilena argued that synthesis is a key element of culture,the bringing together of different elements in a dynamic process of change andadaptation, but that the UNESCO approach to intangible heritage fails toencompass this aspect. Can museums do better, engaging with change andtransformation in cultural heritage?Marilena gave examples from a group of museums trying toengage in new ways with communities, and acting as more than just a treasurehouse. The museums in her study were all adopting what might be seen as apost-colonial model for the museum, attempting to establish themselves as ‘contactzones’, to use James Clifford’s description.Marilena first explored practice at the National Museum ofthe American Indian in Washington, which adopted the ‘appropriate museology’approach advocated by Christina Kreps, for example by respecting the beliefs ofsource communities in how objects are displayed and stored. The museum acts ascustodian, but sees ownership as continuing to rest with the tribes who are thesource communities. This ethos is also expressed in the representationalstrategies in the exhibitions, which aim to be multi-vocal, resisting thesingle authoritative voice of the traditional museum display. New technologyallows individual stories to come to the fore.The approach at Te Papa in Wellington is similar, in that itrespects the Maori notion of Taonga, that is, seeing objects as ancestors andliving treasures. Marilena looked at one particular instance of this in themuseum’s practice, when the museum wanted to build a house for performance. Themodel adopted for the house recast the museum’s approach authenticity byaccepting community ideas about how the house should be built over academicideas about the tradition of such buildings.While NMAI and Te Papa are relatively well known and oftendiscussed in the UK, I hadn’t previously come across Marilena’s third example,the museum of Vanuatu. When this island group gained independence in 1980, therevival of custom was an important aspect of nation building. The museum hasemphasised this in its practice, concentrating on recording intangibleheritage, rather than collecting material culture. Marilena described a projectto train local fieldworkers in ethnographic techniques to enable them to recordtraditions and the museum attempts to engage with these in a creative way,which is open to development and reinterpretation.By now, we were running out of time in the appointed lunchhour slot – though her audience were keen to hear more - and Marilena gave onlybrief examples from the last two museums in her study, the Horniman in Londonand the Muséedu Quai Branly in Paris. She ended with a summary of the characteristics of apeople-centred museology, which might offer a model for museums wishing toengage with intangible heritage, and which draws on the best aspects of thework of the museums in her study. It would involve: working with communities,empowering and respecting the voices of different groups, rethinking the meaningof collections, using new media to represent intangible heritage and allowingspace for the performance of intangible heritage. Most crucially, it requiresan intellectual approach which emphasises cultural revival, impermanence andrenewal rather than archival documentation. This is clearly a challenge to muchmuseum practice if taken seriously – but a fascinating one.

***STOP PRESS***

Museums (em)Power PhD Conference

We have a new PhD conference upcoming this year September 13-14, 2018. It is called Museums (em)Power and will thematically explore power from a contemporary, museum context. The official website and details are forthcoming. Stay tuned to the Attic Blog for the latest!